On Tue, May 13, 2003 at 05:14:15PM +0200, Lubos Vrbka wrote:
> Justin Honold wrote:
> >>i have few probably very stupid questions concerning nfs. i have several 
> >>computers and i want them to mount shared /etc and /home directories 
> >>from server over nfs. just to explain - "shared /etc" is not mounted 
> >>directly to /etc, it's just used to get shared passwd files...
> >
> >
> >have you considered running nis instead of doing this?
> i don't know anything about nis. what's that? the current setup works 
> and i just want to replace old server (~10 years old, and still works 
> fine under netbsd) with a new one... but if nis would be "cleaner and 
> easier" i'd give it a try. where can i find more info, examples, ...?

NIS is very convenient, but it doesn't deal well with unreliable networks.
I've had processes hang on NIS because of network blips, and not return
even when the network became available again.

From a reliability perspective, it could be better to rdist or rsync
master.passwd and run pwd_mkdb on it.

I kept some notes at:
	http://backyard.homeunix.net/~ben/docs/comp/unix/netbsd/nis

Cheers,

Ben